<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:epub="http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops" epub:prefix="z3998: http://www.daisy.org/z3998/2012/vocab/structure/, se: https://standardebooks.org/vocab/1.0" xml:lang="en-GB">
	<head>
		<title>IX</title>
		<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
		<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
	</head>
	<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
		<section id="chapter-9" epub:type="chapter">
			<h2>DR. LANYON’S NARRATIVE</h2>
<p>
On the ninth of January, now four days ago, I received by the evening delivery
a registered envelope, addressed in the hand of my colleague and old school
companion, Henry Jekyll. I was a good deal surprised by this; for we were by no
means in the habit of correspondence; I had seen the man, dined with him,
indeed, the night before; and I could imagine nothing in our intercourse that
should justify formality of registration. The contents increased my wonder; for
this is how the letter ran:
</p>
<p class="right">
“10<i>th December</i>, 18—.
</p>
<p>
“Dear Lanyon,—You are one of my oldest friends; and although we may
have differed at times on scientific questions, I cannot remember, at least on
my side, any break in our affection. There was never a day when, if you had
said to me, ‘Jekyll, my life, my honour, my reason, depend upon
you,’ I would not have sacrificed my left hand to help you. Lanyon, my
life, my honour, my reason, are all at your mercy; if you fail me to-night, I
am lost. You might suppose, after this preface, that I am going to ask you for
something dishonourable to grant. Judge for yourself.
</p>
<p>
“I want you to postpone all other engagements for to-night—ay, even
if you were summoned to the bedside of an emperor; to take a cab, unless your
carriage should be actually at the door; and with this letter in your hand for
consultation, to drive straight to my house. Poole, my butler, has his orders;
you will find him waiting your arrival with a locksmith. The door of my cabinet
is then to be forced; and you are to go in alone; to open the glazed press
(letter E) on the left hand, breaking the lock if it be shut; and to draw out,
<i>with all its contents as they stand</i>, the fourth drawer from the top or
(which is the same thing) the third from the bottom. In my extreme distress of
mind, I have a morbid fear of misdirecting you; but even if I am in error, you
may know the right drawer by its contents: some powders, a phial and a paper
book. This drawer I beg of you to carry back with you to Cavendish Square
exactly as it stands.
</p>
<p>
“That is the first part of the service: now for the second. You should be
back, if you set out at once on the receipt of this, long before midnight; but
I will leave you that amount of margin, not only in the fear of one of those
obstacles that can neither be prevented nor foreseen, but because an hour when
your servants are in bed is to be preferred for what will then remain to do. At
midnight, then, I have to ask you to be alone in your consulting room, to admit
with your own hand into the house a man who will present himself in my name,
and to place in his hands the drawer that you will have brought with you from
my cabinet. Then you will have played your part and earned my gratitude
completely. Five minutes afterwards, if you insist upon an explanation, you
will have understood that these arrangements are of capital importance; and
that by the neglect of one of them, fantastic as they must appear, you might
have charged your conscience with my death or the shipwreck of my reason.
</p>
<p>
“Confident as I am that you will not trifle with this appeal, my heart
sinks and my hand trembles at the bare thought of such a possibility. Think of
me at this hour, in a strange place, labouring under a blackness of distress
that no fancy can exaggerate, and yet well aware that, if you will but
punctually serve me, my troubles will roll away like a story that is told.
Serve me, my dear Lanyon and save
</p>
<p class="right">
“Your friend,
</p>
<p class="right">
“H.J.
</p>
<p>
“P.S.—I had already sealed this up when a fresh terror struck upon
my soul. It is possible that the post-office may fail me, and this letter not
come into your hands until to-morrow morning. In that case, dear Lanyon, do my
errand when it shall be most convenient for you in the course of the day; and
once more expect my messenger at midnight. It may then already be too late; and
if that night passes without event, you will know that you have seen the last
of Henry Jekyll.”<br/><br/>
</p>
<p>
Upon the reading of this letter, I made sure my colleague was insane; but till
that was proved beyond the possibility of doubt, I felt bound to do as he
requested. The less I understood of this farrago, the less I was in a position
to judge of its importance; and an appeal so worded could not be set aside
without a grave responsibility. I rose accordingly from table, got into a
hansom, and drove straight to Jekyll’s house. The butler was awaiting my
arrival; he had received by the same post as mine a registered letter of
instruction, and had sent at once for a locksmith and a carpenter. The
tradesmen came while we were yet speaking; and we moved in a body to old Dr.
Denman’s surgical theatre, from which (as you are doubtless aware)
Jekyll’s private cabinet is most conveniently entered. The door was very
strong, the lock excellent; the carpenter avowed he would have great trouble
and have to do much damage, if force were to be used; and the locksmith was
near despair. But this last was a handy fellow, and after two hour’s
work, the door stood open. The press marked E was unlocked; and I took out the
drawer, had it filled up with straw and tied in a sheet, and returned with it
to Cavendish Square.
</p>
<p>
Here I proceeded to examine its contents. The powders were neatly enough made
up, but not with the nicety of the dispensing chemist; so that it was plain
they were of Jekyll’s private manufacture; and when I opened one of the
wrappers I found what seemed to me a simple crystalline salt of a white colour.
The phial, to which I next turned my attention, might have been about half full
of a blood-red liquor, which was highly pungent to the sense of smell and
seemed to me to contain phosphorus and some volatile ether. At the other
ingredients I could make no guess. The book was an ordinary version book and
contained little but a series of dates. These covered a period of many years,
but I observed that the entries ceased nearly a year ago and quite abruptly.
Here and there a brief remark was appended to a date, usually no more than a
single word: “double” occurring perhaps six times in a total of
several hundred entries; and once very early in the list and followed by
several marks of exclamation, “total failure!!!” All this, though
it whetted my curiosity, told me little that was definite. Here were a phial of
some salt, and the record of a series of experiments that had led (like too
many of Jekyll’s investigations) to no end of practical usefulness. How
could the presence of these articles in my house affect either the honour, the
sanity, or the life of my flighty colleague? If his messenger could go to one
place, why could he not go to another? And even granting some impediment, why
was this gentleman to be received by me in secret? The more I reflected the
more convinced I grew that I was dealing with a case of cerebral disease; and
though I dismissed my servants to bed, I loaded an old revolver, that I might
be found in some posture of self-defence.
</p>
<p>
Twelve o’clock had scarce rung out over London, ere the knocker sounded
very gently on the door. I went myself at the summons, and found a small man
crouching against the pillars of the portico.
</p>
<p>
“Are you come from Dr. Jekyll?” I asked.
</p>
<p>
He told me “yes” by a constrained gesture; and when I had bidden
him enter, he did not obey me without a searching backward glance into the
darkness of the square. There was a policeman not far off, advancing with his
bull’s eye open; and at the sight, I thought my visitor started and made
greater haste.
</p>
<p>
These particulars struck me, I confess, disagreeably; and as I followed him
into the bright light of the consulting room, I kept my hand ready on my
weapon. Here, at last, I had a chance of clearly seeing him. I had never set
eyes on him before, so much was certain. He was small, as I have said; I was
struck besides with the shocking expression of his face, with his remarkable
combination of great muscular activity and great apparent debility of
constitution, and—last but not least—with the odd, subjective
disturbance caused by his neighbourhood. This bore some resemblance to
incipient rigour, and was accompanied by a marked sinking of the pulse. At the
time, I set it down to some idiosyncratic, personal distaste, and merely
wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms; but I have since had reason to
believe the cause to lie much deeper in the nature of man, and to turn on some
nobler hinge than the principle of hatred.
</p>
<p>
This person (who had thus, from the first moment of his entrance, struck in me
what I can only describe as a disgustful curiosity) was dressed in a fashion
that would have made an ordinary person laughable; his clothes, that is to say,
although they were of rich and sober fabric, were enormously too large for him
in every measurement—the trousers hanging on his legs and rolled up to
keep them from the ground, the waist of the coat below his haunches, and the
collar sprawling wide upon his shoulders. Strange to relate, this ludicrous
accoutrement was far from moving me to laughter. Rather, as there was something
abnormal and misbegotten in the very essence of the creature that now faced
me—something seizing, surprising and revolting—this fresh disparity
seemed but to fit in with and to reinforce it; so that to my interest in the
man’s nature and character, there was added a curiosity as to his origin,
his life, his fortune and status in the world.
</p>
<p>
These observations, though they have taken so great a space to be set down in,
were yet the work of a few seconds. My visitor was, indeed, on fire with sombre
excitement.
</p>
<p>
“Have you got it?” he cried. “Have you got it?” And so
lively was his impatience that he even laid his hand upon my arm and sought to
shake me.
</p>
<p>
I put him back, conscious at his touch of a certain icy pang along my blood.
“Come, sir,” said I. “You forget that I have not yet the
pleasure of your acquaintance. Be seated, if you please.” And I showed
him an example, and sat down myself in my customary seat and with as fair an
imitation of my ordinary manner to a patient, as the lateness of the hour, the
nature of my preoccupations, and the horror I had of my visitor, would suffer
me to muster.
</p>
<p>
“I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanyon,” he replied civilly enough.
“What you say is very well founded; and my impatience has shown its heels
to my politeness. I come here at the instance of your colleague, Dr. Henry
Jekyll, on a piece of business of some moment; and I understood...” He
paused and put his hand to his throat, and I could see, in spite of his
collected manner, that he was wrestling against the approaches of the
hysteria—“I understood, a drawer...”
</p>
<p>
But here I took pity on my visitor’s suspense, and some perhaps on my own
growing curiosity.
</p>
<p>
“There it is, sir,” said I, pointing to the drawer, where it lay on
the floor behind a table and still covered with the sheet.
</p>
<p>
He sprang to it, and then paused, and laid his hand upon his heart; I could
hear his teeth grate with the convulsive action of his jaws; and his face was
so ghastly to see that I grew alarmed both for his life and reason.
</p>
<p>
“Compose yourself,” said I.
</p>
<p>
He turned a dreadful smile to me, and as if with the decision of despair,
plucked away the sheet. At sight of the contents, he uttered one loud sob of
such immense relief that I sat petrified. And the next moment, in a voice that
was already fairly well under control, “Have you a graduated
glass?” he asked.
</p>
<p>
I rose from my place with something of an effort and gave him what he asked.
</p>
<p>
He thanked me with a smiling nod, measured out a few minims of the red tincture
and added one of the powders. The mixture, which was at first of a reddish hue,
began, in proportion as the crystals melted, to brighten in colour, to
effervesce audibly, and to throw off small fumes of vapour. Suddenly and at the
same moment, the ebullition ceased and the compound changed to a dark purple,
which faded again more slowly to a watery green. My visitor, who had watched
these metamorphoses with a keen eye, smiled, set down the glass upon the table,
and then turned and looked upon me with an air of scrutiny.
</p>
<p>
“And now,” said he, “to settle what remains. Will you be
wise? will you be guided? will you suffer me to take this glass in my hand and
to go forth from your house without further parley? or has the greed of
curiosity too much command of you? Think before you answer, for it shall be
done as you decide. As you decide, you shall be left as you were before, and
neither richer nor wiser, unless the sense of service rendered to a man in
mortal distress may be counted as a kind of riches of the soul. Or, if you
shall so prefer to choose, a new province of knowledge and new avenues to fame
and power shall be laid open to you, here, in this room, upon the instant; and
your sight shall be blasted by a prodigy to stagger the unbelief of
Satan.”
</p>
<p>
“Sir,” said I, affecting a coolness that I was far from truly
possessing, “you speak enigmas, and you will perhaps not wonder that I
hear you with no very strong impression of belief. But I have gone too far in
the way of inexplicable services to pause before I see the end.”
</p>
<p>
“It is well,” replied my visitor. “Lanyon, you remember your
vows: what follows is under the seal of our profession. And now, you who have
so long been bound to the most narrow and material views, you who have denied
the virtue of transcendental medicine, you who have derided your
superiors—behold!”
</p>
<p>
He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry followed; he reeled,
staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with injected eyes,
gasping with open mouth; and as I looked there came, I thought, a
change—he seemed to swell—his face became suddenly black and the
features seemed to melt and alter—and the next moment, I had sprung to my
feet and leaped back against the wall, my arms raised to shield me from that
prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.
</p>
<p>
“O God!” I screamed, and “O God!” again and again; for
there before my eyes—pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping
before him with his hands, like a man restored from death—there stood
Henry Jekyll!
</p>
<p>
What he told me in the next hour, I cannot bring my mind to set on paper. I saw
what I saw, I heard what I heard, and my soul sickened at it; and yet now when
that sight has faded from my eyes, I ask myself if I believe it, and I cannot
answer. My life is shaken to its roots; sleep has left me; the deadliest terror
sits by me at all hours of the day and night; and I feel that my days are
numbered, and that I must die; and yet I shall die incredulous. As for the
moral turpitude that man unveiled to me, even with tears of penitence, I
cannot, even in memory, dwell on it without a start of horror. I will say but
one thing, Utterson, and that (if you can bring your mind to credit it) will be
more than enough. The creature who crept into my house that night was, on
Jekyll’s own confession, known by the name of Hyde and hunted for in
every corner of the land as the murderer of Carew.
</p>
<p class="right">
HASTIE LANYON.
</p>
		</section>
	</body>
</html>
